With the advent of pagers and mobile telephones, the wireless service industry has grown into a multi-billion dollar industry. The Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association calculates that 120 million Americans own a mobile telephone—almost half of the U.S. population. As the development and availability of mobile telephones progresses, the benefits of mobile telephones are reaching more and more people. Standard desktop telephones, however, are still used in greater numbers. The combination of both a mobile telephone and a standard desktop telephone for the same user has its drawbacks.
When a user is located at a stationary location (office, home, etc.), a standard desktop telephone is always preferred to a mobile telephone for reasons such as superior audio quality, ease of use, reliability of a fixed connection and no Radio Frequency (RF) utilization. Unfortunately, to allow mobility and still provide these advantages at the stationary location requires two independent devices (a mobile telephone and a desktop telephone) with two distinct telephone numbers and profiles (phone book, recent calls list, appointments, calendar, etc.) for each user.
It would be ideal to require only one telephone number and one profile that can be shared between a user's mobile telephone and desktop telephone. To this end, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) desktop telephones and Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) mobile telephones have enjoyed increasing popularity. VoIP desktop telephones are typically wire-enabled telephones that provide IP telephony over a network, such as the Internet. WLAN mobile telephones are mobile telephones that utilize IP telephony through a WLAN. However, for a LAN desktop telephone and a WLAN mobile telephone to share one telephone number and profile, there must be an efficient method and system for accurately identifying which mobile telephone or telephones are authorized to transfer their identity to a given desktop telephone.
Therefore a need exists to overcome the problems with the prior art as discussed above.